Timestamps:
4:22 | Buying Commercial
8:55 | Lessons To Be Learned
12:15 | ‘Aha’ Moments
15:42 | Looking For Potential
18:45 | Commercial Properties: The Same Rules Apply to All
20:44 | Different Mentors
24:38 | Advice to Your Past Self
25:05 | Looking Into The Future

Resources and Links:

[32:09] I have never been as busy as what I have been over the last two years.

 

 

This is Property Investory where we talk to successful property investors to find out more about their stories, mindset, and strategies.

 

I’m Tyrone Shum, and in this episode we’re continuing the conversation with the founder of Revolve Commercial, Mish Daniel. She has found success in commercial property investments, and we will hear about the strategy that she uses as well as the mentors that have assisted her on her journey.

I’m Tyrone Shum, and in this episode we’re continuing the conversation with the founder of Revolve Commercial, Mish Daniel. Discover why she gave up everything in South Africa to come to Australia and start all over again with no business or properties, and how having knowledge is always going to trump having money when it comes to commercial property.

(Rewrite) I’m Tyrone Shum, and in this episode we’re continuing the conversation with the founder of Revolve Commercial, Mish Daniel. We’ll explore why she gave up her life in South Africa, including properties and money, and moved to Australia to start from scratch. She’ll uncover her investment strategy and explain why having knowledge is priceless.

 

**End intro music**

 

After experiencing the events that happened to Daniel personally in Cape Town, she had to make a big change in her life and that’s when she made the move to Australia. There were new challenges she faced with the move.

 

[6:07] Look, I ran the numbers, I did the maths. So if we, if we talk about third world currency versus a first, first world currency, I very quickly worked out that if I were to keep our assets in South Africa and try and live off those assets, they're going to be very short lived. Because when you're doing the conversion, by the time you get the money over here, to put it into some sort of context, we lost 93% of the value of our money by doing that sort of conversion. So, by the time, by the time we did get all our money here, which, as I said, took a number of years, that, the money that arrived in Australia was only worth 8%, of what it was worth previously. Okay, so that was enough for us just to kind of start and get going and, and, and, you know, just find our feet. But it's, it was quite a long time going before we could do that. You know, and I think for those, for the listeners who have immigrated, they would relate to you know, you move here, you don't have a mechanic, you don't have a dentist, you don't have a doctor, you don't have friends, you don't have, you don't know the food, people speak funny, different accents. So, you know, it's, it's a whole, it's a whole different world.

 

In order to land on her feet, Daniel had help from a friend…

 

[9:11] Well, it was, it was a massive fall from grace put it that way. Because I was, I was brought in on a visa called the 567, which is a working visa. And it was a company that had been inviting me to move to Australia for probably close on 10 years. So, a family connection. And every time I came to Australia, he'd always say to me, 'come and work for me, come and start a branch you'd be so successful, you'd be so good'. Anyway, and eventually I took him up on it and said great. He said choose any city on the East Coast, go wherever you want. We need because they were on the west coast in WA and I said 'well, no brainer, Brisbane is the city to go to'. Although, although I must say I was very hard pressed because I knew that the business would be far more successful in Sydney. And I said, 'no, I'm choosing Brisbane and we're going to set that up'. So I arrived here three days later, I found a warehouse, I had, I had shelving where, and all the equipment coming in office, office materials coming in, and started setting up marketing advertising and got out there and started, basically started a new business for this company in Brisbane.

 

[10:43] Hit the ground, got it up and running, worked for them for two years. Brisbane became the most successful branch in the, in the company, took over the Sydney office and then established a Melbourne office as well. And yeah, and after two years, I said, 'guys, that's it. I've done my time, time for me to move on and go and do what I want to do'.

 

 

After leaving this position and using her property knowledge from South Africa, Daniel began to invest in Australian properties…

 

[11:31] When I arrived here, I thought, well, it's something that I know, like I love, I want to do. So, I started having a look at the residential market and I thought, well, I'll stuff up, I'll stick my toe in and start with residential. And I did a couple of courses and, and thought, well, I need to know how things work over here. So, I spent, I probably spent the first two to three years looking, seeing, learning as much as I possibly could. And I did every single prop, property course that I could. However, being on that kind of visa and I'm really grateful for this is, I wasn't allowed to buy investment property. I was restricted to buying investment property as a foreigner on a 457. And it was actually a saving grace, because we did find a really good property and that I wanted to jump into and I wanted to do a development on it. And at the last minute, I couldn't do that.

 

[12:31] So, I was a little bit disappointed but I found out shortly afterwards and I thought, what about commercial? Because commercial is, is something that I know. It's something that I've been into for a long time and I've been involved in a lot of commercial in South Africa. And I found that commercial was a far better option and I was allowed to buy commercial. So, I went out like a bull in a china shop and had heavily leveraged boosts. Bought my first commercial, which was a warehouse, industrial warehouse and yeah, just, just basically started, started purchasing as much commercial as I possibly could with what we had, and started that journey. And being that I, I've always done uplift properties, that's kind of my niche. So, I was, I was out there looking for properties that I could add value to and, you know, leverage against.

 

After investing in that first commercial property in 2017, Daniel began to take part in group deals…

 

[14:02] From there we just, you know, I've been leveraging off whatever, whatever monies we could, whatever we were making, and look, I'm a very good saver. So, we save very well and manage money, I would say pretty well and also having come from, from where we have and built my, my estate up to where I had, and starting all over again, I really had to be very mindful of our finances. So, we did quite a lot of leveraging and did so valuing up equity drawdown and to purchase the next one and the next one. So, what I've gone into since then is doing couple of group deals where buying, you know, using other people's money basically, bringing investors in, doing those uplift properties. And either strata titling them, selling them off. Otherwise keeping them, managing them and we've subsequently started a asset management company, where we're looking after over 40, 40 properties.

 

[16:01] A lot of the assets that we were buying, we were purchasing through the end of sort of 2018, into 2019. And a lot of those assets we bought through COVID-19 and have turned out to be probably the best, you know, best acquisitions that we've made. You know, and, and now we managing those properties as property assets, you know, as management fees. We've done huge uplifts on those properties, not necessarily external, but on the management side. So in other words, with leasing, tenanting, that sort of thing. We've added tremendous value and had those properties revalued at 40, 50% more than what they were when we purchased them.

 

 

Throughout any property investment journey, there is always something to be learned. For Daniel, this is making sure you have a good education…

 

[17:24] I guess the biggest lesson is, is, is not having the right education or not having the right advice. You know, going in and buying a property. So, one of the biggest mistakes that I made was I went in like a bull in a china shop and bought this really fantastic property. And everything stacked up and I listened to the real estate agents, I thought, gee, what a nice guy, we, we great friends, bla bla, bla, bla bla. Well, when you, your selling agent is never your friend.

 

[18:08] And bought this property and about three or four days later, I went and had an interview with the tenant. Well, back to front, honey. First you have the interview with the tenant, before you go unconditional. And I found, and the tenant was a hell of a nice guy. He said to me, 'yeah, but you know, we moving out of this building in a year's time'. And I was like, 'What? No, you can't be, you been here for 25 years, you got all of this machinery?' He said 'no. We amalgamating and we moving out'. You know, and it was like, ouch. Okay, so the cardinal rule number one in commercial property is interview your tenant. Speak to your tenants, you know, have that, that one on one conversation with them, no matter what.

 

[19:48] So, the, the we, we sat with that property for around about six months. And what I did is I rallied up all the agents and basically interviewed the agents to find out which ones were the better agents. And gave them a memorandum of, of what we wanted in terms of type of tenants and what we were prepared to do. So, incentives for the tenants. So, we, we ended up getting a temporary tenant for about four or five months, which kind of saw us through. However, we'd own that property for just under 18 months. So, we had a good, a good profit that we'd made on that property. And the vacancy was, and we call, we call it holdover costs. So, the holding cost of their property was basically sucked up by the profits that we made the year earlier. Long story short, I had set my sights on getting a national tenant in there. I wanted a five year, five plus five year lease and this is all about mindset. I had, I had re, repurpose the building. And the funny thing was, I put pictures all over my office of where I've been working and I decided that's the tenant that I want and I'm going to go for this and no matter what, I'm just going to put it out there to the universe, that I want a national tenant that's with a five by five year lease. And that's exactly what, what we got. So, it came through one of the bid agents that we'd been working with, because we kind of shortlisted down to three agents. And a little bit in negotiation back and forward and we, we put a national tenant in there with our five by five year lease.

 

 

On most property investment journeys, you’re also likely to have an ‘aha’ moment. Daniel shares one of hers…

 

[23:17] Well, a couple of aha moments. And I think one of the one of the best that I can relate to in Australia is helping people out. You know, because people, people were seeing what I was doing, and I was talking about, and I was showing them, example, samples, case studies of what I had done. And they were saying, wow, you know, like, can you do that for us? So, the aha moment was, there are so many people that are in negative or neutrally geared residential properties, that they don't know the splendorous wonder of, of commercial, let alone how to do this in commercial. And I mean, I've met the most amazing people. There was one guy in particular, who really was my aha moment we really clicked and he saw, kind of got a glimpse of it. And he said, right, ‘I'm going to throw caution to wind and I'm going to come on board with you. Show me what you can do’. Long story short, it was a property that was on the market for 1.9 million. I negotiated that property. We ended up buying it for about $1.54. And I said to Peter, 'just leave it to me. Let me sort this property out'. And it was really ailing. I think it's, there were 10 tenants, of which there were four vacancies. And those, those tenants really were not happy at the time. Long story short, we turn this property around, re-tenanted it, repositioned it, you know, cleaned it up. And the aha moment was when he had that property revaluated it came in at just under three million.

Coming up after the break, we will hear about the mentors that influenced Daniel… 

 

[32:56] Look, I think my, my, my biggest mentor was probably my father.

 

The advice that Daniel would tell her younger self…

 

[37:45] Really go for what you believe in.

 

What Daniel is looking forward to in the future…

 

[38:00] Um, I think I'm most excited about doing more group deals.

And that’s next. I’m Tyrone Shum and you’re listening to Property Investory.

 

When investing in property, it’s  important to find a strategy that works for you. While Daniel lived in South Africa, her strategy was to buy properties at a consistent rate…

 

[1:20] I started buying properties, and my commitment was that I would buy one property every single year. So, different kinds of properties and I collected about 29 properties over the years, residential, commercial, right across the board. I did a couple of developments. We did what you would call strata titling over here, so blocks of flats, where we would go and clean them up, turn them out, turn them around, and reposition them in the market.

 

Throughout Daniel’s property investment journey in both South Africa and Australia, there has been one key strategy that she used…

 

[26:06] I think the most, the most successful strategy, right throughout my entire real estate career, across the, across the, the big blue lake, has always, has always been uplift. You know, because right from the age of 22, when I started buying property, with my father's words ringing in my ears. I always, I always change those properties. I would turn them around, or I would, I would create just a beautiful space, opening them up and creating flow. So probably 90% of the properties that I purchased, I would always do uplift, sort of renovations on them. So I love adding value and that's exactly what I'd be doing.

 

[27:02] That's exactly what I was doing on, on those properties is, you know, I'd see the potential, walk into them, see what we could do with those properties, knock a couple of walls out, turn those properties around, and just creates, you know, a beautiful space.

 

[27:21] Now, in, in commercial, you don't actually have to do as much as what you're doing in residential. So in commercial, we would, we would focus on giving it a clean lick of paint. You know, doing floors, doing walls, doing facades, doing outside areas, maybe cleaning up parking, parking lots, pavements, walkways. You know, making it, making it sort of desirable for tenants, to want to invite their clients to come to. Because bearing in mind that they are destinations. You know, so you want to, you want to create a destination that the tenant is proud of, that they're proud of bringing their clients to. And in commercial always say that, you know, people could live in dumps at home. But they're, what they, what they're portraying in the workplace is professional, clean, and, you know, a beautiful destination to invite. It's got to be inviting for their clients to come to.

 

No matter what type of commercial property one purchases, it needs to be welcoming to clients. Daniel shares that this is important factor, even in a warehouse…

 

[29:08] It depends what type of tenant is moving into and what type of warehouse that you have. But for our warehouse in particular, we repainted the entire warehouse, you know, on the outside. So, we repurposed the, we gave them a blank canvas so they could see it from you know, they, they could do with it whatever, whatever they wanted. And when moving on the inside of the space, we had a beautiful mezzanine that in fact, I had just paid for with the previous tenants and the new tenant that came in said 'oh Mish, we need to remove the mezzanine because our machinery is too high machineries'.

 

[29:54] So, that was a little bit of a compromise, but I thought, hell, you know what? $50,000 worth of mezzanine versus five year lease? Hello, I'll go for the five year lease. You know, so and all of that is negotiated as you, as you so rightfully said into the lease, over a period of time. So, you know, there's, there's a lot of repurposing that you can do. Something that we really, really love, and we've been looking at is taking just ordinary tool slab, ugly warehouses, and turning them into beautiful workspaces. So, it's sort of a industrial office kind of thing. Where you've got beautiful wood, and stainless steel railings, and just, you know, adding, adding a couple of different types of open, open office with beautiful finishes. You know, in turning it into that, that industrial, but friendly, warm, cosy sort of environment.

 

Over her business and property journey, she has had a few mentors that have helped to shape her beliefs…

 

[32:56] I think my biggest mentor was probably my father, in terms of structure and design, and, and, you know, just learning the stuff from a very, very young age of knowing how things work. I mean, I can walk into a building now, and I can see what a load bearing wall is. I can look at I-beams and tell you whether it's a 16 inch or 22 inch I-beam and what the weight capacity would be. You know, on that stuff, just by virtue, you know? 

[33:27] Yes, I don't have certifications for that and I'm not an engineer. But I could tell you some, a lot of very funny stories about that, but I won't bore you with it now. But I think my biggest mentor, and, and growing up in a family of five and coming from the background that we did, with lots of war, there was a lot of sadness and, you know, my, my parents were very religious. I didn't necessarily believe in their religions, and I kept on thinking there must be, there must be something bigger. There's, there's, there's a bigger something out there and that's why I talk about the universe, the universal energy.

 

Daniel’s second mentor was somebody that she met a little later in life…

 

[34:10] I ran into Tony Robbins in my early 20s, and I mean, it was back in the days when Tony Robbins, the only recordings that you could get of Tony Robbins were on cassette, on tape.

 

[34:36] Now it's all online. Yeah, so I set myself up for a challenge and I decided that I was going to do his, he's 31 he's, 30 Day Challenge. That was his very, very, very first training. I think I must have been about, probably about 20, 22, 23. And I was just starting out in business. I was starting out with, with all of this and I did that, and actually ended up doing it 3, 4, 5 times because it was just so insightful. There was so much and every time I repeated it, I would learn something new. So, it was, it was great information.

 

Daniel looked up to one last mentor because of something that they had in common…

 

[35:20] One of my biggest mentors was Richard Branson. So, I was, I was totally amazed because Richard Branson is dyslexic, and I was dyslexic. And I always thought when, when growing up in a school, because I couldn't, I couldn't write very well, or read very well, that I was stupid. But I was incredibly creative and when I ran into Richard Branson again, when he was starting out in his 20s, and 30s, I found out you know, he's name was, was around before virgin times, and he was dyslexic. I thought, there it is. I’ve got something in common with this guy, I'm gonna follow him. 

[36:09] So, the businesses that, that I ran, I kind of principled it on a lot of what Richard Branson did with collaboration. So, all those, all those businesses were kind of set up in collaboration. And, and I really, really feel very strongly that success is all about collaboration. You know, the more collaborative unions or partners or joint ventures that you can have, the more successful you can be.

 

When it comes to learning about and being involved in collaboration, Daniel has another influence…

[36:57] I also follow Mindvalley, which is also about collaboration and yeah, same sort of thing. So, this beautiful stuff  it is, lovely stuff, working together.

 

Reflecting upon her journey, Daniel shares her advice that she would tell her younger self…

 

[37:20] I would have said to her start, start investing offshore number one. I wish I could have, I wish I did, I wish I took my advice earlier and, and never give up. Never give up. Tenacity. You know? Really go for what you believe in. Yeah, don't ever give up. Yeah. Dream big.

Now, looking towards the future, Daniel shares what she is looking forward to…

 

[38:00] I'm most excited about doing more group deals. So, we busy, looking at putting together and we sort of halfway through putting together more group deals that more people can get involved in. So, so people that don't have the funds or the resources to buy these uplift properties by themselves, or they can't afford it. 

[36:25] I mean, these, these are fairly expensive properties in there's quite a lot of holding cost involved, and uplift cost as well. And I'm inviting them to come along and join me and learn with me. And, you know, on this journey of, you know, sticking their toe and seeing how it's done. So, we really are in 2022, planning on doing more of those and inviting yeah, inviting whoever wants to get involved to come along and join us to find out more, and do this with me. Yes, the more the merrier.

 

[39:20] Yeah, I'm super excited. I mean, I'm, I'm super excited about putting that team together and pulling all those people together, so.

Lastly, how much of your success do you think is of your skill and intelligence and hard work, and how much of it is because of luck?

[39:59] Luck is a result of skill, intelligence, and hard, hard work in my opinion. So, the harder you work, the more you, you get educated, the more skills you have the luckier you're going to be, you know.

 

 

Thank you to Mish Daniel, our guest on this episode of Property Investory.